Adam’s Stepsons takes the core questions of Blade Runner and distills them into a tight, character-driven drama. It lacks the sweeping visuals of Villeneuve or the noir cityscape of Scott — but it delivers something arguably more intimate:
A quiet horror — and quiet triumph — in the collapse of identity, where the artificial doesn’t just mimic life…
It replaces it.
Over the weekend (my first with no student work to grade — finally! — since April), I decided to ask our “old” friend ChatGPT if it could analyze my sci-fi novella Adam’s Stepsons. Really, I was just curious what it would say.
It said…a LOT.
It correctly interpreted the title (something that many readers apparently didn’t get). It correctly identified the main themes as part of a “post-humanism” sub-genre of science fiction. And once I gave it three short excerpts (from the near the end of the story), it gave a frighteningly accurate thematic and symbolic analysis of the entire novella…just from three short excerpts of a total of about six pages.
I won’t copy all it gave me (you all can go try on your own and see what it says!). But let me share what the program thought were key themes:
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed. And when you’re older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
The story of the last 20 years of pop culture is, in many ways, the Victory Of The Nerd: Comic book films, gaming adaptations, the general adoption of deeply nerdy genre trappings like time loop stories, superheroes, and more, all making billions of dollars at the box office as geek obsessions infiltrate the body mainstream.
This time I tried “mmhmm” studio. Some bumps and bruises, but managed to survive!
Oh, and it doesn’t really have a “pronunciation guide.” Oops. The names (I thought) were fairly easy to pronounce. (Weng is not “wehng” but more like “wong,” or even “wung,” but otherwise straightforward…)
It’s also thought that water on Earth is largely (or entirely) the result of comets and asteroids bombarding it (it remains debatable to what degree Earth already had water, but since when it formed the Earth was first molten lava and then dry as a bone, I think it far more likely that water came here from elsewhere, and science tends to agree).
I’ve already blogged about the origins of Bringer of Light, when I (finally) finished the first draft back in early September. In a sense, I’ve been constantly blogging the science behind the story.
But I haven’t discussed the characters at all. And despite what some old-fashioned writers may think (just finished a particularly badly-written snarky “why your books don’t sell” piece of trash that claimed science fiction shouldn’t have any emotions in it…say what? sorry not sorry), if the characters of a story aren’t interesting, there isn’t much point in reading a story.
So for the next couple of weeks, I’ll write a bit about the characters — the crew of the Artemis, the crew of the Sagittarius, the UN flunkies (sorry, career politicos) on Mars and Luna and so forth. There are lots of characters, and their interaction is complicated. Or is it?
I would get into my scifi influences at this point, but long blogs are slogs. So I’ll come back to that tomorrow!
Coffee time. Also to finish up at least one unrelated project and also the hardcover manuscript (which needs to be a different paper size than the paperback for some reason).
I finally managed to get 1st edition copies of the famed Star Trek Readers, published in the late ’60s and early ’70s. My mother had copies when I was a kid, and they were among the first fictional stories I ever read.
The content varies slightly from the broadcast episodes, which apparently drew the ire of fans at the time. In defense of the British writer James Blish, he had not seen the episodes at the time of writing and was relying entirely on the scripts. As he himself wrote as an “Afterword” that appears (naturally) in the middle of the Reader II book, adapting script to prose is just as hard as adapting prose to scripts. Some scenes were skipped and dialogue boiled down to help the flow of the narrative, and fans were often upset to discover their favorite lines didn’t appear in the books.
The confusing part is the arrangement of each Reader into “books.” For example, Reader I (which has no label “I,” actually) consists of “Star Trek 2” (called “Book I”), “Star Trek 3” (Book II), and “Star Trek 8” (Book III). That reflects the original paperback publications by Bantam, but just makes things difficult. As a kid, I had no idea which episodes came before which. Not that it mattered! This was the first show I saw “in living color” — in the “TV room” of my grandparents’ house (we had a small black and white TV at home in the mid to late ’70s, so I never saw “The Incredible Hulk” (Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno) in color.)
All told, 59 of the original 79 ST: TOS episodes were adapted by Blish. Of the twenty not appearing in the Readers, “Mudd’s Women” and “What Are Little Girls Made of?” are odd exclusions. “Shore Leave” (the most childish of the first season episodes) is also not there. But there are still plenty to satisfy.
Two episodes were renamed by Blish for some reason; “The Man Trap” — the first episode broadcast but the third episode made — was renamed “The Unreal McCoy” (which gives away the plot), and “Charlie X” was renamed “Charlie’s Law.” The original pilot, “The Cage,” appears under the name “The Menagerie” as it was later broadcast (in two parts as part of the court martial of Spock, in which Star Trek characters watch Star Trek, but the novelized version omits the court martial framework — the “Afterword” comments that this script was covered in handwritten rewrites, making it difficult to work with.)
Most satisfying of all is the snarky dedication of Reader II — “To Harlan Ellison who was right all the time.”
Way back in 2015, my good friend Rami Z Cohen came to me with an idea for a story. He had written two or three scenes about a group of asteroid hunters who stumbled upon something bizarre. The idea of mining asteroids was news at the time (and still is, although probably too expensive right now and not a worthwhile investment until we actually get some people in space who need metals without relying on NASA/ESA/JAXA/ISRO/etc).
So Rami and I began to email ideas back and forth for a few weeks, then we started to flesh out his characters and plot. I wrote a synopsis and outline and we hashed out the background.
Well, I managed to watch the first two episodes, but I really couldn’t continue after that.
Watanabe is right. Netflix screwed up by doing what all US-based companies do when they try to make scifi: they focus on the violence and forget about the ambiance.
But as he says at the end of the interview, “The value of the original anime is somehow far higher now.”
(Read the original interview in its entirety here, if you can stomach the political pop-ups.)
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